The answers is these people do not believe the current solution is the right solution, and they have something they believe is better.
Surely the answer is a list of the specific things that they believe their product can achieve better than their competitors, rather than a "they wouldn't have created it if it weren't better" type reply.
Clients don't like it when you tell them "well we can't handle it right now, try us again in 3 to 6 months."
They like it a hell of a lot more than being told "We can handle that no problem" only for you to either screw their network up or fail to deliver anything.
By telling the big customers that you're not ready, you're losing the big customer, at least for now. By attempting to take them on when you can't handle what you've already got, you'll more than likely lose the new customer, your existing customers and your entire business (and quite likely have lawyers on your tail as well).
With all the talk of outsourcing taking away jobs.. how come it's hard to find coders who are motivated and know what they're doing?
Because with all the talk of outsourcers taking dev jobs away, anyone who knows what they are doing has moving out of coding and into jobs less likely to be offshored?
If you create a market where people don't see any long term future in development, don't be surprised if no-one sees development as a long term career.
The disadvantages of the Walkman/Discman... more storage meant more physical space.... The iPod solved the major problems of its predecessors
And the iPod's solved this how? The 30gb iPod is bigger than the Nano. The 60/80gb iPod is bigger than the 30gb. Any more than that and you'd need two iPods.
Of course, it's not perfect, but I don't see how the availability of new technology will change the perfect music player radically like it did before.
I can think of several tech advances that will revolutionise the music player in the next few years. One of which is when fast mobile wifi becomes so cheap that it becomes practical to replace the disk/memory card based mp3 player with one that streams from your home server. Apple may be able to create a succesful iPod that does this, but it's also entirely possible that it's too late to the market with such a device (in the way that Sony were with a good mp3 player) and someone else steals the market.
There is a significant difference between the two -
Outsourcing without offshoring is usually a positive strategic choice, and a result of businesses moving non-core activities to firms more focussed on that activity and likely to be more efficient/effective at that activity. For instance, most large firms outsource their catering to an external provider. It may have some effect on the overall job market, but usually just means that your role gets moved to a more specialist employer. As this is a move based largely on specialist people being able to do the job better, costs should stay cheaper.
Offshoring, on the other hand, is almost always negative and tactical and little more than a race to the bottom on simple employee cost (usually as a result of poor employment regulation/health and safety/general standard of living etc in the target country). Eventually, however, increased demand for jobs in that country will force wages up, and the only option is to move on to the next cheap economy.
It's undoubtably the TV channel doing it rather than the original program or the advert. There's a couple of the satellite channels that are really bad for it. Don't know whether it's deliberate or accidental, but it's extremely annoying when it happens.
They aren't far off that now. I regularly find shows that turn the volume up so loud during commercials that I'm pretty much forced to either fast forward through them or turn the sound off. I'm puzzled as to exactly what they think they are achieving.
For me, the big difference is more at the input level than the output. I usually play PC games sat on an office-type chair, at a desk with a keyboard and mouse in front of me. I play console games slumped on the sofa with a joypad.
I wouldn't want to play something like Civilisation on a console. It would just be painful. But by the same token, I wouldn't really want to play Pro Evolution Soccer on a PC (or at least in a typical PC environment).
Because victims of crime are always best placed to figure out how to prevent it happening again....
50,000 signature petition
People often sign these petitions because they are too embarrassed to say no. If someone is stopped in the street and asked "if you don't approve of violent pornography, would you please sign our petition" and refuse, it looks as if they've just said "Nope. I love my violent porn.". And anyway, 50,000 isn't exactly a huge amount - there were over a million signatures on petitions presented to parliament in protest at the invasion of Iraq, yet the government took no notice (and in the case of fox hunting, there were over 1.5 million signatures on petitions either for or against the ban).
Evidence from criminal psychologists that can show strong evidence of otherwise normal people who have become violent criminals as a result of looking at images of violent crime (rather than vice versa), and that this is likely to be higher than the number of people who might get the urge to carry out their violent fantansies if they couldn't get their fix from looking at pictures instead, would be a good reason to defend the law. The fact that victims back the law and that 50,000 people have backed it is neither here nor there.
just don't see the point of removing the DRM from a paid for iTunes file
Because I want to be able to play the DRM'd music I bought off iTunes (not making that mistake again) on my wireless music player without having to burn it onto a CD and then re-rip it to mp3. I know this is against the terms that I agreed to when I bought the tracks, but I struggle to see how Apple benefits by preventing me from being able to do this.
I don't think my current one (Orange SPV600, that I've had for around 3 months) has crashed/frozen once yet. The SPV500 that I had for 18 months before that managed about 3-6 months between crashes and that's far better than most of my previous phones ever did (a Nokia, a Motorola and a Samsung one that not only froze about once per month, it was also so badly designed that it shorted on a metal chain that I had in my pocket melting a hole in my trousers).
All of which makes you wonder why wiretap evidence is still inadmissible in UK courts
My paranoia tells me that it's so that the police can claim "We have loads of evidence against him but its all wiretaps which we can't use in court, so we need to detain him without going to trial".
I meant what I said - Every Windows program that I've tried. WINE is evidently not the answer for everyone, but if someone is serious about moving away from Windows and it's that one killer app that they must use that's stopping them, then I'd suggest trying WINE before dismissing the idea out of hand. I had one app that stopped me moving to MacOS a couple of years ago when I bought my last laptop, which was a Postgresql management tool that I couldn't get on the Mac. However, it works fine under WINE so I can now use Linux quite happily on my main PC.
The thing that keeps me on Windows on my laptop is more hardware than software. I'm not convinced that all of my laptop's features (touchpad etc) will work OK, or whether my iPod will be recognised. I should really try them, but as I tend to only use my laptop to connect using FreeNX to my Linux server I've not felt enough of a drive to do it yet.
Several apps I use are available on Windows but not Linux. Therefore, Windows (sadly) has value to me.Have you tried WINE? Every Windows program I've tried so far works fine on that.
English speakers prefer to say July 7th instead of 7th of July
American English speakers might - I don't know anyone who says July 7th (maybe July the 7th though). Anyway, I say "half past six", but I wouldn't write that time down as 1/2 - 6 (or even 30:6).
MM/DD/YYYY as a numeric representation makes no logical sense. DD/MM/YYYY is small/medium/large date units, whereas MM/DD/YYYY is medium/small/large. Who orders things by putting the smallest unit of measurement in the middle? Do you write your time as hh:ss:mm?
Personally I prefer YYYY-MM-DD - large/medium/small as the largest digit (e.g., the millenium) is to the left as well - makes organising/sorting documents using their name much easier.
You are still equating 'efficiency' with manpower. That's not the case. As with the bike example, the gasoline that you're burning doesn't appear out of nowhere. The issue isn't the amount of human energy taken to extract the oil. It's the amount of energy that's being burned by using that oil.
Your dad, plus 720 gallons of gas, and whatever other resources are being burned up through use of fertilizer, irrigation etc, produce enough food for 5000 people.
It is IMPOSSIBLE for our current farming and distribution to be less efficient than our tribal ancestors. If it took 1 human calorie of work to output 1 calorie of food, 100% of the world's population would be farmers, truck drivers, or store clerks.
But human calories are not the only thing to take into account. What about the fuel that's burned up driving the tractor? What about the fuel that's burned up making the tractor? What about the other resources used in making the tractor? What about the energy required to create the fertilizer? Etc...
Human energy alone is not a good way of measuring efficiency - the most efficient form of transport known to man is the bicycle (cycling requires on average around 35 calories/mile, cars use up around 1800). However. I'm pretty certain that a car requires considerably less than 35 calories/mile from the driver himself.
This doesn't prove that farming is less efficient than it was 2000 years ago, but the amount that one person can farm is an irrelevant figure if you don't take into account the energy behind all of the technology that he uses.
There's not a great deal of good tech journalism in the maintream press, but I'd guess that there wasn't a great deal of good drugs journalism in the mainstream press in the 60/70s either. That doesn't mean that it's not out there.
Look at magazines like Edge in the UK - 'serious' games journalism for serious gamers. They seem to 'get' gaming, and I rarely read an article in there that strikes me as dumbing down (and if you want Gonzo-style journalism, there's always the Biffovision or Jeff Minter columns). I suspect there's plenty of other examples out there.
The difference is not that there's no good journalists out there, it's more likely the opposite. It's very hard for an individual tech journalist to have the same impact as someone like Thompson did when there's a thousand tech mags and a million tech blogs out there.
Slashdot Mirror
By telling the big customers that you're not ready, you're losing the big customer, at least for now. By attempting to take them on when you can't handle what you've already got, you'll more than likely lose the new customer, your existing customers and your entire business (and quite likely have lawyers on your tail as well).
If you create a market where people don't see any long term future in development, don't be surprised if no-one sees development as a long term career.
And the iPod's solved this how? The 30gb iPod is bigger than the Nano. The 60/80gb iPod is bigger than the 30gb. Any more than that and you'd need two iPods.
I can think of several tech advances that will revolutionise the music player in the next few years. One of which is when fast mobile wifi becomes so cheap that it becomes practical to replace the disk/memory card based mp3 player with one that streams from your home server. Apple may be able to create a succesful iPod that does this, but it's also entirely possible that it's too late to the market with such a device (in the way that Sony were with a good mp3 player) and someone else steals the market.
In other news...UK English Baffles Non-British Web Users.
There is a significant difference between the two -
Outsourcing without offshoring is usually a positive strategic choice, and a result of businesses moving non-core activities to firms more focussed on that activity and likely to be more efficient/effective at that activity. For instance, most large firms outsource their catering to an external provider. It may have some effect on the overall job market, but usually just means that your role gets moved to a more specialist employer. As this is a move based largely on specialist people being able to do the job better, costs should stay cheaper.
Offshoring, on the other hand, is almost always negative and tactical and little more than a race to the bottom on simple employee cost (usually as a result of poor employment regulation/health and safety/general standard of living etc in the target country). Eventually, however, increased demand for jobs in that country will force wages up, and the only option is to move on to the next cheap economy.
It's undoubtably the TV channel doing it rather than the original program or the advert. There's a couple of the satellite channels that are really bad for it. Don't know whether it's deliberate or accidental, but it's extremely annoying when it happens.
They aren't far off that now. I regularly find shows that turn the volume up so loud during commercials that I'm pretty much forced to either fast forward through them or turn the sound off. I'm puzzled as to exactly what they think they are achieving.
For me, the big difference is more at the input level than the output. I usually play PC games sat on an office-type chair, at a desk with a keyboard and mouse in front of me. I play console games slumped on the sofa with a joypad.
I wouldn't want to play something like Civilisation on a console. It would just be painful. But by the same token, I wouldn't really want to play Pro Evolution Soccer on a PC (or at least in a typical PC environment).
People often sign these petitions because they are too embarrassed to say no. If someone is stopped in the street and asked "if you don't approve of violent pornography, would you please sign our petition" and refuse, it looks as if they've just said "Nope. I love my violent porn.". And anyway, 50,000 isn't exactly a huge amount - there were over a million signatures on petitions presented to parliament in protest at the invasion of Iraq, yet the government took no notice (and in the case of fox hunting, there were over 1.5 million signatures on petitions either for or against the ban).
Evidence from criminal psychologists that can show strong evidence of otherwise normal people who have become violent criminals as a result of looking at images of violent crime (rather than vice versa), and that this is likely to be higher than the number of people who might get the urge to carry out their violent fantansies if they couldn't get their fix from looking at pictures instead, would be a good reason to defend the law. The fact that victims back the law and that 50,000 people have backed it is neither here nor there.
It's not OK to advocate murder, but possession of a movie that has someone being murdered in it is not (yet) a criminal offence.
Because I want to be able to play the DRM'd music I bought off iTunes (not making that mistake again) on my wireless music player without having to burn it onto a CD and then re-rip it to mp3. I know this is against the terms that I agreed to when I bought the tracks, but I struggle to see how Apple benefits by preventing me from being able to do this.
I don't think my current one (Orange SPV600, that I've had for around 3 months) has crashed/frozen once yet. The SPV500 that I had for 18 months before that managed about 3-6 months between crashes and that's far better than most of my previous phones ever did (a Nokia, a Motorola and a Samsung one that not only froze about once per month, it was also so badly designed that it shorted on a metal chain that I had in my pocket melting a hole in my trousers).
The thing that keeps me on Windows on my laptop is more hardware than software. I'm not convinced that all of my laptop's features (touchpad etc) will work OK, or whether my iPod will be recognised. I should really try them, but as I tend to only use my laptop to connect using FreeNX to my Linux server I've not felt enough of a drive to do it yet.
Several apps I use are available on Windows but not Linux. Therefore, Windows (sadly) has value to me.Have you tried WINE? Every Windows program I've tried so far works fine on that.
MM/DD/YYYY as a numeric representation makes no logical sense. DD/MM/YYYY is small/medium/large date units, whereas MM/DD/YYYY is medium/small/large. Who orders things by putting the smallest unit of measurement in the middle? Do you write your time as hh:ss:mm?
Personally I prefer YYYY-MM-DD - large/medium/small as the largest digit (e.g., the millenium) is to the left as well - makes organising/sorting documents using their name much easier.
Oh, BTW, to help you answer the question about the bike
Efficiency - The ratio of the effective or useful output to the total input in any system.
You are still equating 'efficiency' with manpower. That's not the case. As with the bike example, the gasoline that you're burning doesn't appear out of nowhere. The issue isn't the amount of human energy taken to extract the oil. It's the amount of energy that's being burned by using that oil.
Your dad, plus 720 gallons of gas, and whatever other resources are being burned up through use of fertilizer, irrigation etc, produce enough food for 5000 people.
Human energy alone is not a good way of measuring efficiency - the most efficient form of transport known to man is the bicycle (cycling requires on average around 35 calories/mile, cars use up around 1800). However. I'm pretty certain that a car requires considerably less than 35 calories/mile from the driver himself.
This doesn't prove that farming is less efficient than it was 2000 years ago, but the amount that one person can farm is an irrelevant figure if you don't take into account the energy behind all of the technology that he uses.
I use my Windows Mobile based SPV 600 phone all the time. It's pretty much perfect for keeping my work diary on.
There's not a great deal of good tech journalism in the maintream press, but I'd guess that there wasn't a great deal of good drugs journalism in the mainstream press in the 60/70s either. That doesn't mean that it's not out there.
Look at magazines like Edge in the UK - 'serious' games journalism for serious gamers. They seem to 'get' gaming, and I rarely read an article in there that strikes me as dumbing down (and if you want Gonzo-style journalism, there's always the Biffovision or Jeff Minter columns). I suspect there's plenty of other examples out there.
The difference is not that there's no good journalists out there, it's more likely the opposite. It's very hard for an individual tech journalist to have the same impact as someone like Thompson did when there's a thousand tech mags and a million tech blogs out there.